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Playing the street hustler Mouss alongside Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in the new thriller "The Next Three Days" wasn't such a stretch for Robert Diggs, better known to you as the RZA.

"Last time I did a film with Russell Crowe, I was a cop. This time I'm on the other side of the law," says the actor, rapper and mastermind of Wu-Tang Clan, who spent two weeks filming in Pittsburgh with director Paul Haggis for the move, which opens today. "[Crowe's] character, he's a school teacher that's badly in love with his wife, goes to extremes to try to help her and even does some foolish things. It forces him to go to the underground, and that's when he comes across my character, and it's a pretty bad day for him."

Much worse, in fact, than their last collaboration, when the RZA played the policeman Moses Jones in "American Gangster." Stepping into the role of Mouss required a different mindset.

"I just had to go back to growing back in the hood, you know what I mean," he says with a laugh. "To play a cop I had to play the guys who were chasing me as a kid. I had to reverse the psychology."

It seems counterintuitive to apply the label "cult band" to a group that has lasted as long, and sold as many records, as Rush has.

Since 1974, the Canadian trio has sold more than 25 million albums in the United States alone, and its string of consecutive gold (24) or platinum (14) studio albums places Rush third all-time behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The band has landed its work on both radio and the charts, with tunes like "Spirit of Radio," "Tom Sawyer," "Closer to the Heart" and "Limelight" bringing Rush mainstream exposure in the '80s. The group has also proven a consistent concert draw for decades.

Yet Rush really does remain "the biggest cult band on Earth," as singer and bassist Geddy Lee muses in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage," an excellent documentary (out today on DVD) that spans the trio's lengthy career. (The band also stops July 19 at Mohegan Sun, where it will perform its 1981 album "Moving Pictures" in its entirety.)

Turns out that Cyrus' song "The Climb" wasn't eligible in the category best song written for a motion picture, television or other media, because it wasn't actually written specifically for a motion picture, television or other media.

Although the song appeared on the "Hannah Montana" movie soundtrack, songwriter Jessi Alexander shopped it around to other artists before it made its way to Cyrus, EW.com and The NewsRoom report.

Karen O, on the other hand, did specifically write "All Is Love" for the soundtrack to "Where the Wild Things Are." Because she was the next highest vote getter, she gets the nomination in Cyrus' place.

Had he lived long enough to complete it, the 50-show run Michael Jackson was set to perform at London's O2 Arena would have have cemented his already considerable status as a music legend.

When Jackson died unexpectedly in June at age 50, he was in the midst of rehearsals for the shows, which would have marked his return to the stage for the first time in more than 10 years. Instead of the grand display he had planned, we're left with a different spectacle in "This Is It," an elegy of sorts culled from more than 100 hours of rehearsal footage.

It's an unprecedented, unparalleled look at the man behind the legend as he developed and practiced for the concerts -- a view that is more compelling, and in many respects more valuable, than the finished product ever could have been.

"We want to take them someplace they have never seen before," he tells his crew.

"New Moon," the second movie in the "Twilight" series, doesn't come out until Nov. 20. But there's enough buzz about the soundtrack, due Oct. 20, that Atlantic Records is releasing it early: Friday, to be precise.

The soundtrack to the first movie, which came out last year, included acts like Paramore, Perry Farrell, Linkin Park and Collective Soul, and was a big hit.

The release date has been pushed back a month to Oct. 27, but you don't have to wait that long to hear new songs by the Swell Season.

The duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova composed the score and wrote the songs for the 2007 movie "Once," for which they won an Oscar and garnered two Grammy nominations for the song "Falling Slowly." They also starred in the movie, about an Irish street musician and a piano-playing Czech cleaning woman who find they have a musical affinity.

Hansard (of the Frames) and Irglova recorded their new album, "Strict Joy," in Bridgeport with producer Peter Katis. (In fact, Hansard was spotted hanging out at a Mates of State show in Milford in March.) Hear the first single, "Low Rising," here, and check out the "Tiny Desk" concert they gave at NPR here.

Naming your band after the work of a Beat author is one thing (bad), contributing the soundtrack to a documentary about a Beat author is quite another (potentially very good).

In this case, the contributors are Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. The pair collaborated on a dozen original songs for the soundtrack to "One Fast Move or I'm Gone," a documentary about Jack Kerouac's harrowing 1962 novel "Big Sur."

Farrar (above) and Gibbard were initially slated to be among various contributors to the soundtrack, but as others dropped out of the project, they continued, using Kerouac's words from the book as lyrics. The pair talks to Paste magazine here about their collaboration.

The film and the album are due Oct. 20, one day before the 40th anniversary of Kerouac's death. The album will come as a standalone CD, a CD/DVD package and a limited edition boxed set packaged with the novel, a 40-page book on the documentary and the CD/DVD. The album will also be released on vinyl.

Finally, we have the makings of a holiday tradition for weird families -- and wouldn't you know it, the Flaming Lips are involved.

After years of halting progress, the Oklahoma band has finally finished its celluloid debut (not counting the 2005 documentary "Fearless Freaks"), "Christmas on Mars: A Fantastical Film Freakout Featuring the Flaming Lips," out today on DVD and playing at Real Art Ways Nov. 21-23.

Filmed piece by piece over the past seven years, largely in singer/director Wayne Coyne's back yard in Oklahoma City, "Christmas on Mars" takes place then and there as a team from Earth is busy colonizing the Red Planet.

It's possible we have reached the point where there's just not that much more to say about Johnny Cash.

That's the way it seems, at least, in "Johnny Cash's America," a new documentary that aired last week on the Biography channel and is available today on Columbia/Legacy as part of a CD/DVD package.

The 88-minute program recounts Cash's life through chapters with titles like "Faith," "Protest" and "Redemption." They're propelled by narration and by observations from his son, John Jr., daughters Rosanne and Cindy, and musicians he played with and influenced, including Tennessee Three bassist Marshall Grant, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, Steve Earle, Jim Dickinson and even Snoop Dogg.

Mostly, though, they say what we already know: The Man in Black was a study in contrasts.

Vampires are all the rage again, what with "True Blood" on HBO and the forthcoming movies "Blood: The Last Vampire" and "Twilight," so it makes sense that bands would get in on the act, too.

But not necessarily the bands you might think. Goth shlock-rockers Evanescence? Nope. Try teen pop-punk band Paramore. The group contributed two songs to the soundtrack to "Twilight," NME.com reports, and is set to film a video for one of them, "Decode."

The soundtrack is said to also include tunes from Perry Farrell, Muse and actor Robert Pattinson, who plays hunky vampire Edward Cullin. The movie opens Nov. 21.

It's been years in the making, but the Flaming Lips' fabled film "Christmas on Mars" is finally finished -- and there are screening dates to prove it.

The first of them comes Friday, Sept. 12, at the Krain Theater in the KGB Complex, 85 East 4th St., in New York.

Begun in 2001 and filmed largely in singer Wayne Coyne's backyard in Oklahoma City, on sets he built himself, "Christmas on Mars" opens, naturally, at Christmastime, as Earth astronauts are busy colonizing the Red Planet. But when an oxygen generator and a gravity control pod malfunction, Major Syrtis (Lips' multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, above right) and his team, including the Lips' bassist Michael Ivins, fear for the worst, until a compassionate alien superbeing (Coyne, above left) arrives, inspiring and helping the isolated astronauts.

There's almost no way this can't be awesome.

Screenings, are, of course irregular, with showtimes in New York as early as 7 a.m. for fans who want to "go to Mars before they get to work." Distributor Cinema Purgatorio is expected to add screenings in other cities soon, and not necessarily in movie theaters -- rock clubs, museums and stage theaters are also in the running. This sounds like a job for Real Art Ways.

Bored at work as the hours tick down to a three-day weekend? Why not pass the time with a free screening of "Be Here to Love Me," the 2004 documentary about the brilliant Texas singer and songwriter Townes Van Zandt?

In fact, courtesy of snagfilms.com, you can watch it right here, right now (it's 100 minutes long, plus, of course, the commercial breaks that make it free):

Amy Winehouse had the gig and lost it with her erratic behavior, so Jack White and Alicia Keys have stepped in to duet on the theme song for the next James Bond movie, Columbia Pictures announced Tuesday.

"Another Way to Die," slated to open the 22nd James Bond adventure, "Quantum of Solace," is the first Bond-theme duet. The movie is scheduled for release in November, and the soundtrack is due Oct. 28 on J Records.

White wrote and produced the song and also plays drums on the track. He and Keys join the illustrious ranks of previous Bond singers, including Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney, U2, Madonna and Chris Cornell.

Speaking of movies about bands, French filmmaker Vincent Moon has made a film about the National.

"A Skin, A Night" chronicles the making of the band's outstanding 2007 album "Boxer," which topped my best-of list last year.

"We're very much in the middle of something, and we don't know where we'll end up," one of the band members says in the trailer.

The 60-minute movie is scheduled for release as a DVD May 20 on Beggars Banquet. "A Skin, A Night" will be packaged with "The Virginia EP," a 12-track collection of b-sides, live versions, demos and radio sessions.

It would have been easy for Martin Scorsese to have avoided the cat-and-mouse subterfuge over the set list that opens "Shine a Light," his new Rolling Stones concert film.

Scorsese spends the first few minutes of the movie obsessing over the set, which the band clues him in on about 10 seconds before the lights go up. All that Sturm und Drang was for naught, however: The Stones' list is always written, in what looks like chalk, on the amplifier stacks on either side of Charlie Watts' drum kit (or, in stadium settings, on the plexiglass barrier next to his drums). All Scorsese had to do was train one of his high-powered movie cameras on it and he would have known what song the band was opening with ("Jumpin' Jack Flash"), what it was closing with ("Satisfaction"), and everything in between.

Aside from that bit of manufactured spontaneity however, "Shine a Light" is a riveting close-up, nitty gritty look at the one of the greatest bands ever formed. The movie captures the Stones' two-night stand a few years ago at the Beacon Theatre in New York. It's an intimate place anyway, especially compared to, say, Rentschler Field, but Scorsese gets you so close to the band you'll have chills.

Is the latest issue of Rolling Stone really the second since May to feature Johnny Depp on the cover? Sure,
Depp shared the other one with Keith Richards to plug "Pirates of the Caribbean," and sure Depp is a great actor.

But still, somebody at Rolling Stone must be a leeetle obsessed for the magazine to be giving Depp so much dap. Or maybe putting Depp on the cover is a proven way to boost newsstand sales in an otherwise slow period ...

Music biopics abide by certain tropes in their quest to simplify for the big screen the often-familiar stories of complicated
people. Flashbacks, portentous foreshadowing, transformative life lessons — they're among the standard devices that have appeared recently in movies about Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and the Supremes (via "Dream Girls," a fictionalized take).

Judd Apatow's "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" skewers every one of them with good-natured glee, loosing John C. Reilly in a delightfully funny turn as the gifted, but dim, country music superstar Dewey Cox.

The movie opens with Cox in the shadows backstage just minutes before he's supposed to perform on TV. As an assistant tries to get his attention, Tim Meadows steps in and says, with deadpan gravitas, "He's got to think about his entire life before he goes on." Thus, the movie-length flashback begins.

The truth is that Joy Division singer Ian Curtis was a victim of circumstance. The tragedy is that the circumstance was largely, but inadvertently, of his own making.

It's the unspoken thread that runs through "Control," Anton Corbijn's biopic about Curtis, whose harrowing lyrics and distinctive baritone helped make Joy Division one of the most influential bands of the past 30 years.

Feeling pressure from the growing buzz around Joy Division, and troubled by his marriage to a woman he no longer loved, guilt over a consuming love affair and worsening epilepsy, Curtis committed suicide in May 1980, shortly before the band was supposed to have embarked on its first U.S. tour.

Billed as an "unconventional journey into the life and times of Bob Dylan," the would-be biopic "I'm Not
There" is not about Dylan at all -- at least not in any literal or linear sense.

It's not really even about exploring the myth(s) that Dylan has worked so assiduously to cultivate. In fact, it's more about augmenting them, crawling inside them as if they were a nest of warm blankets and reveling in the self-styled elusiveness of "this ever-elusive American icon."

It's the equivalent of performing an autopsy on a body stuffed with confetti and not wondering how it got there.

Interviewed toward the start of "Pete Seeger: The Power of Song," the powerful documentary about the folk musician's fascinating life, Dylan says something to the effect that when Seeger sings, it's impossible not to sing along with him.

Sure enough, the old people bundled into their seats at Real Art Ways murmured along during a screening Wednesday night, and for once, ambient noise in a movie theater was charming -- nearly as charming as Seeger himself, who still cuts an intelligent, good-natured and supremely enthusiastic figure at the venerable age of 88.

There has long been talk of a coordinated effort among law-enforcement agencies across the country to keep tabs on rappers. Hip-hop fan and first-time director Don Sikorski set out to see for himself.

The result is "Rap Sheet: Hip-Hop and the Cops," an 80-minute documentary that premiered last year at the IFC Center in New York. Now available on DVD through Screen Media Films, Sikorski's film includes footage of questionable police activity and (often grainy) interviews with some of the biggest names in rap. They insist there are "hip-hop cops" violating their civil liberties, while various former law-enforcement officials say the authorities are drawn by criminal elements in the rap world.

It's a complex subject, which Sikorski acknowledges at the start. "A war is raging between hip-hop and law enforcement," reads text on the screen as the film begins. "As with most wars, right and wrong are not always obvious."

Television shows super-sized for the big screen tend to blow it one of two ways: Either they get carried away with the grander scope of cinema and make a mess of things ("The X Files," for example) or the premise of the show isn't strong enough to support more than limited doses (we're looking at you, "Ladies Man").

Sometimes, though, they get it just right. "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut" did it by mocking the big-screen format with explosions and musical numbers, including the Oscar-nominated song "Blame Canada."

"The Simpsons Movie" does it with focused writing and a strong narrative arc that stays true to the spirit of the TV version. The movie is funny, irreverent and subtle in all the ways we have come to expect over some 400 episodes of the show. Sure, some of those individual episodes are stronger than the movie, but that's not really such a surprise, given such an extensive body of work.

Somewhere, buried in the 2 hours and 48 minutes comprising "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," is a scene featuring Jack Sparrow's father. It's the much-discussed cameo by Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, which is a perfect casting choice, given that Johnny Depp based the character in part on Keef.

So, how does he do? Pretty well, actually. Took me a minute to recognize him, because he was in costume (and not the usual matted-hair-and-open-shirt combo he sports on stage with the Stones). His whiskey-soaked rasp gave him away though, and they managed to work a primitive acoustic guitar into his scene.

If only they could have worked in Mick Jagger as his partner in pillaging/creative foil.

Because keeping a running diary on the Grammys was so much fun, why not do the same thing for the Oscars? The correct answer: I clearly have nothing better to do. Regardless, I've ventured away from my sprawling South End estate to join a few friends (and eat their food) while we watch Hollywood's paroxysms of self-congratulation.

There will be fewer entires here, I imagine, because a) I don't write about film and b) I approach this more as an onlooker than as someone who, you know, cares. And away we go ...

CAKE listening film aficionados are invited to interpret our version of the classic Black Sabbath song, "War Pigs," in a short film or music video. "War Pigs" will be included on CAKE's upcoming "Rarities" album. Entries can express any theme of your choice, in any genre or shooting format, but must be uploaded on YouTube with a link sent to: info@cakemusic.com. To download the song, please sign our mailing list by Friday, January 19th. Entries will be judged on overall impact and artistic merit. A grand prize of $1,000 will be awarded to the best submission. All entries must be received by March 15, 2007. Good Luck!

This sort of thing is becoming more common: The Decemberists last year invited fans to use green-screen footage of the band performing "O Valencia!" and build a video around it. This led to the fantastic "Shred Off" episode of "The Colbert Report," which has earned "keep until I delete" status on my DVR.

Not only is he the best at snapping off a certain colorful term for an Oedipal complex, it turns out that cinematic badass Samuel L. Jackson can sing the blues, too.

Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake star in the forthcoming motion picture "Black Snake Moan," the second movie from "Hustle & Flow" director Craig Brewer. Jackson portrays Lazarus, a repentant middle-aged bluesman living in the hill country of northern Mississippi, an area that has produced the best blues music of the past decade, thanks largely to Fat Possum Records.

Lazarus (no symbolism in that name) attempts to reform the sex-fiend Rae (Ricci). Abused as a child and abandoned by her mother, Rae has trouble breaking the cycle, and becomes a sexual doormat for the men in the small town where she lives.

While watching the 35th anniversary edition of "Easy Rider" on DVD last night, I was struck by two thoughts:

1. No wonder so many Boomers are so obsessed with the '60s. 2. Peter Fonda's Wyatt character was right when he concluded, "We blew it."

The 1969 movie, a classic, chronicles the ill-fated adventures of two long-hair friends from Los Angeles as they ride their motorcycles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras some time in the late '60s. It's unintentionally hilarious all these years later, for what has become a collection of cliches about hippies, squares and drugs. Just try not to laugh when Jack Nicholson's character sees a joint for the first time and says, wide-eyed, "Lord have mercy! Is that what this is?" A second later, he spouts the conventional wisdom about marijuana leading to harder drugs, then lights up.

Having been on a Leonard Cohen kick lately, I was sorry to have missed "I'm Your Man" during its super-brief run in Hartford last month.

I was delighted, then, when the mail this week yielded a DVD screener copy of the all-star concert featuring Cohen's songs, performed by the likes of Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton, Antony Hegarty, the Handsome Family, Linda Thompson, her son Teddy Thompson, and most of the Wainwright family: Rufus, his sister Martha and their mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle.

Cohen's a brilliant songwriter, but album versions of his songs always seem to be burdened with unwieldy musical arrangments that inevitably detract from the power of his lyrics. Much of that is rectified here, where the excellent band assembled by producer Hal Willner stays true to the spirit of his songs without resorting to note-for-note re-creations of the music.

I just saw "Running With Scissors," a wrenching, intense and sometimes funny movie featuring career-defining performances by Annette Bening and Jill Clayburgh. They were riveting, but I kept noticing the soundtrack, and that's not such a good thing.

It may well have been intentional, but all these powerful moments were continually undercut by song choices that seemed jarring or cliched. "Pick Up the Pieces" by Average White Band, "Blinded by the Light" by Manfred Mann's Earth Band (written by Bruce Springsteen), "Teach Your Children Well" by Crosby, Stills & Nash and "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John are classic songs, which means they're familiar songs, which means they have a million connotations in listeners' memories other than the ones associated with this movie.

I haven't read the memoir by Augusten Burroughs upon which the movie is based, so it's entirely possible these songs are what he remembers hearing during his perilous adolescent years. But this wasn't a period piece dependent on the music, like "Almost Famous" or "Dazed and Confused" were, and I think less obvious musical choices would have made more than a few scenes that much more compelling.

I'm not much of a Steely Dan fan. I know, I know: they're geniuses, some of the best musicians ever to make pop music, blah blah blah. I freely concede all that. Their songs just never did much for me. I always thought they were decent guys, though, until this.

The short version: It's an open letter to Luke Wilson, complaining that his brother, Owen, was in a movie the band feels was inspired by Steely Dan's song "Cousin Dupree," about a freeloading relative. Their problem, though, isn't that the movie has been critically savaged. It's that they're not getting paid.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for The New York Times, has written an essay exploring the role and purpose of critics. "Are we out of touch with the audience?" he asks. "Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody’s fun when it doesn’t live up to our notion [of] art? What gives us the right to yell 'bomb' outside a crowded theater?"

He's writing specifically about movies, but many of his points apply to music reviewing, as well. It's not uncommon for music reviewers to receive e-mails from vexed readers asking how we could have been at the same concert they attended (Thomas Kintner's recent review of American Idols Live, for example, generated some irate messages, and plenty of my reviews have angered readers, too).